People with ADHD face more than problems with attention, concentration, and impulses—it’s a serious condition that can take years of a person’s life.
For the 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults with ADHD, the way their brains work means they have difficulty completing tasks that require concentration and planning.
Sometimes it can look like forgetting an appointment, misplacing the car keys, or drinking too much on a work night. These “incidents” are fairly harmless, although they can get worse over the course of life.
A lack of concentration can lead to road accidents; a missed appointment may delay treatment; a tendency to give in to impulses can make it harder to break bad habits.
In the worst cases, people with ADHD are at higher risk of premature death.
A major journal published in Open JAMA Network offers strong new evidence of the link between ADHD and mortality from any cause, as well as suicide, injury, or natural causes.
The analysis also suggests that ADHD medications could reduce the risk of premature death in people with the disorder.
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Researchers from institutions across the United Kingdom reviewed 19 existing studies published between 2012 and 2025. Each study had a slightly different research objective and was conducted in populations around the world: the United States, Canada, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Finland and Denmark.
But all looked at mortality patterns related to ADHD or its treatment.
Together, these data cover more than 15.9 million participants, a sample size that researchers can rarely achieve in a single study. Pooling results from multiple studies can help researchers identify patterns that are less likely to occur due to chance.
This is why reviews and meta-analyses like this are so valuable: scientists can comb through multiple studies to find dominant trends or potential outliers in the research.
Data from 12 of these studies were pooled to calculate risk ratios based on death statistics for people with and without ADHD.
The findings reiterate the risks of leaving ADHD undiagnosed or untreated.
People with ADHD had a 70% higher risk of death from any cause than people without ADHD.
The risk of death by suicide was 90 percent higher among people with ADHD. Their risk of death from unintentional or intentional injury was 50 percent higher, and even the risk of death from natural causes was 30 percent higher.
These results are generally consistent with the results of a previous study, except for the part regarding deaths from natural causes. The previous review found no evidence of higher mortality from natural causes in people with ADHD.
“This difference may reflect the inclusion of more recently published studies or differences in the studies and effect estimates included,” the authors suggest.
The good news is that prescription medications used to treat ADHD are associated with a lower risk of death from any cause in ADHD populations.
The study did not distinguish between the effects of different medications, but in general, stimulants are the medications prescribed for ADHD.
The methods used for this research are not intended to show cause and effect: we cannot say that ADHD is the cause of these death rates, nor that ADHD medications caused the reduction in death rates.
The authors also found many variations between studies, which could be related to factors such as gender balance in the populations studied, cultural attitudes and health services in different countries, and changes in the diagnosis and management of ADHD over the past decade.
“Pooled estimates should be interpreted as average associations across diverse populations and study settings rather than being universally applicable,” the authors note.
“Current evidence suggests that there are multiple factors that may increase mortality risk among people with ADHD, reinforcing the importance of support for health risk management in this population and attention to the structural determinants of poor health experienced disproportionately by people with ADHD,” the authors conclude.
The research was published in Open JAMA Network.
This article was fact-checked by Peter Dockrill and edited by Peter Dockrill. Although we are proud of our process, we are only human. If you spot an error, please let us know.
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